About me
My life as a man began in 1976, when I moved to California and found love and life, and love of life, in my beloved Golden State. From the very beginning, at the Argonaut Inn, to seeing my kids leave home and find their way, I have enjoyed my life here. I fell in love once, twice, three times (the third one stuck). I lived my Walden years in the woods, pounded many nails, returned to college, got a degree, got married, survived cancer, raised a family, wrote much music, built a house, and grew in ways I never thought possible. California is my home.
My music describes my California experience, the joy and sorrow that are always with me, and my life as a sentimental dreamer.
I left Ann Arbor, and my mother besides, in 1976, having dropped out of college in my sophomore year, and after a couple of years of working and hanging and playing rock and roll with Bruce. But I simply had to leave; California was calling. I wanted what the myth of California seemed to offer: freedom, spirit, love, nature, romance. And I got it all. I drove my 1972 Toyota Corolla to the Argonaut inn in Jackson CA, in the Sierra foothills, a communally run gourmet restaurant run by a very cool lady named Kay Sinclair, who got college students who took a term off to come work for room and board and tips. I arrived there, and found that I had landed where I wanted to be. Fell head over heels in love with Judy, and for about a year spent many evenings at the restaurant’s baby grand piano, after the customers had left, writing songs. Many to Judy. It was then and there that I defined myself as a songwriter. Many of the songs I am still working on today got their start at the baby grand in a restaurant looking out over the lights in the valley toward the Sierras of the Gold Country.
But that was just the beginning. Life happened. The Argonaut burned down tragically. I went to work doing ranch work, construction, painting, and forest fire fighting. I spent my “Walden Years” living in a cabin (no plumbing, no electricity) on forty lonely acres outside of Grizzly Flat CA, got busted again for growing pot, this time with my girlfriend, and moved to SoCal where I was the caretaker of the springs at Wheeler Hot Springs on Maricopa Hwy. outside of Ojai CA. Finally, a back injury caught up with me, and my language background stirred in my memory, and I returned to college, UC Santa Barbara, to finish my undergrad, where I found a calling to work with immigrant kids at the high school, and so got trained to teach ESL, an MA in Applied Linguistics at UCLA.
In graduate school, I met Janet. ** She was already a young faculty member at the university, and I was a grad student in that department. We had much in common: a love of language, past experience living in Europe, she in her 20s, and I as a child. We spoke foreign languages. She had just sworn off men in her life; I was at the end of a beautiful but impossible relationship. We were perfect for each other, but didn’t realize it immediately. We dated, got engaged, lived together, got married, had a baby boy; then I got cancer, recovered, had a baby girl, raised a happy family, kids grew up, left home. And our stories continue.
About my music
In a way, almost every song of mine is a letter to someone. As a kid growing up in Barcelona Spain for my formative years, I was instructed to write letters. Lots of them. I got comfortable with the genre by writing to the girl next door; I found some satisfaction in relating this life in Europe with castles and bullfights and languages to a girl in a small town in Michigan. My father insisted I take classical guitar for one year, but then I went to a camp in the Pyrenees Mountains, and one camp counselor had a guitar, and he showed me three chords and two songs, and said you can play most any song with these three chords. To this day, the key of A is my ground zero.
Believe it or not, two nuns got me started as a songwriter. The Singing Nun, whose gorgeous simple melodies bathed in faith in god, told me that one individual, with a guitar and a song, can be and make a thing of beauty. And oh, her exquisite Parisian French! The other nun was none other than Maria, in The Sound of Music, who fell in love, and so could not become a nun. But I was captivated by the image of the wandering songwriter, suitcase and guitar in hand, as Paul Simon said in Homeward Bound.
However, The Beatles have influenced me more than anybody, musically and otherwise. They had it all and did it all. Wrote catchy tunes, danceable rhythms, and lyrics that matured so visibly and swiftly. Their early songs all had some interesting twist or chord; none were copies. Even our mothers like them! But truly, they were the masters. After each iconic album, we waited for the next iteration of this amazing group of twenty-somethings. From Revolver to Rubber Soul to Sargent Pepper. They crafted songs in such a way that they used familiar tropes and devices, but so inventively. And love was always their single most important thing. They were serious. They were playful. They were somber. They taught me how to start a song, how to get to the second verse quickly, how to construct a bridge, how to move to end a song smoothly, and how to bring in one signature chord that would mark the piece, make it unique. In pop music, they are the giants.
